I recently purchased the Thinkpad slice battery for my Thinkpad W520 laptop. This battery also fits the W510, T510, and T520. I noticed that when using the laptop on battery power, the slice battery would drain first followed by the regular 9 cell battery. I came into a problem where i would either nearly drain or all the way drain the slice battery (then continue on to the 9 cell) and would then suspend the laptop. The laptop would power off as it would try to draw from the dead slice battery for power even if the 9 cell had plenty of power left. If you are encountering this issue, update your BIOS to the latest version as it fixes this issue. The latest BIOS is available on lenovo’s website.

I just received my new Thinkpad W520 laptop and the least I can say is, wow, its amazing…

Intel Core i7-2820QM Processor (2.30GHz, 8MB L3)

Dual boot Ubuntu 11.04 64/Windows 7 Professional 64

15.6″ FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Backlit Anti-Glare Display

NVIDIA Quadro 2000M Graphics with 2GB DDR3 Memory

16 GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz SODIMM Memory

UltraNav with TrackPoint & touchpad plus Fingerprint reader

720p Camera

750 GB Primary Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm

1 TB Secondary Hard Disk Drive, 5400rpm

DVD recordable multiburner

Express Card Slot & 4 in 1 Card Reader

9 cell Li-Ion Battery – 55++

Bluetooth 3.0

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3×3 AGN)

2 USB 3.0 ports

1 USB/eSATA

1 Powered USB

Dual digital microphone

ThinkPad Mini Dock Plus Series 3

I’ve had a blast with this thing so far, and can’t wait to dig into it more. It boots up quicker than you can believe and runs several virtual machines simultaneously with no issues at all. I plan on putting in an Intel 310 Soda Creek PCI-E SSD as soon as they get in stock on Newegg to even juice the performance a bit further. There are only two things I dislike about it thus far: 1. the size of the power adapter, its literally 3x the size of the 90W adapter that came with my T500, but that’s understandable I guess for a 170W adapter 2. The speakers are unusually quiet at full volume, even headphones are quieter than I would have thought them to be.